Sunday, March 13, 2011

Sri Aurobindo in Alipore Jail

(Disciple): Vivekananda had a sort of Nirvanic experience. He has himself mentioned something about it.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, that experience is the only one definitely known.

Purani: He also had visions at Amarnath. But he seemed always torn between two tendencies: world-work and direct sadhana.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes. And he used to put more intuitive flashes into his conversations than into his writings. That's what I found on reading Nivedita's book "Vivekananda - The Master As I Saw Him". As a rule too, it is in talk that such flashes come - at last in his case it was so.

Nirodbaran: You said the other day that his spirit visited you inAlipore Jail and told you about the Higher Consciousness from where, I suppose, these intuitive flashes come.

Sri Aurobindo: Yes, he did tell me. I had no idea about things of the Higher Consciousness. I never expected him and yet he came to teach me. And he was exact and precise even in the minutest details.

Nirodbaran: That is very interesting. He has nowhere in his books or conversations spoken of those things. Could his spirit know after death what he didn't know in life?

Sri Aurobindo: Why not? He may have got it afterwards.

S (disciple): Can the spirit evolve after death?

Sri Aurobindo: Of course. But either he may not have known in life or else he may have known and kept silent. A Yogi doesn't say all that he knows. He says only what is necessary. If I wrote all that I know, then it would be ten times the amount I have written.